"The Principles of Psychology" by William James

This proved to be a very weighty book (literally--at 897 pages!), but full of many interesting topics such as habit, consciousness of self, attention, memory, imagination, reasoning, instinct, emotions, will, etc.  The section on habit was excellent--it is all to do with the building of character!

• "No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.  With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved . . . The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in a play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale . . . One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up.  The remedy would be, never to suffer one's self to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterward in some active way.  Let the expression be the least thing in the world . . . but let it not fail to take place."   Faith without works is dead!  We have grown cold in the world due to TV, movies, etc--we cry about things we see and hear from afar, but do we really care enough to do something about someone else's suffering?  What a challenge--to let no emotion be felt without doing something good because of it!
• "Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be.  If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the final result to itself.  He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out."  This is so true!  As the Bible says, "You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things!"